I'm talking to my very neoliberal friend and I'm basically praising China and saying I'd want to move there and she's all "But they censor all the internet!" and I'm honestly at a loss because I don't know enough about their internet situation to have any strong arguments. Is the internet heavily censored in China? Is using VPN not allowed? What's up with their whole internet vibe?
It's definitely that, but also direct censorship for political reasons too. See the infamous visit that JT Chapman (SecondThought) got from homeland security to intimidate him for uploading a video titled "The CIA is a Terrorist Organization." While technically that video is up on youtube somewhere, it is impossible to find unless you directly enter in the url. It is not searchable or findable via google, youtube itself, etc. From my understanding, mostly the bot filtering of things considered bad for advertisers just demonitizes the content, which is of course censorship too, but not outright removal. The "shadowbanning" of content often happens specifically to leftist political content and things like videos that encourage piracy.